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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
by
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
Essay 2: Turgot
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
New York: The MacMillan Company
1905
TURGOT.
I.
PAGE
Birth and family descent 41
His youth at the Sorbonne 47
Intellectual training 52
His college friends: Morellet, and Lomenie de Brienne 54
Turgot refused to become an ecclesiastic 56
His revolt against dominant sophisms of the time 60
Letter to Buffon 61
Precocity of his intellect 65
Letter to Madame de Graffigny 65
Illustrates the influence of Locke 69
Views on marriage 72
On the controversy opened by Rousseau 72
Turgot's power of grave suspense 76
II.
First Discourse at the Sorbonne 78
Analysis of its contents 80
Criticisms upon it 86
It is one-sided 87
And not truly historic 88
Fails to distinguish doctrine from organisation 89
Omits the Christianity of the East 90
And economic conditions 92
The contemporary position of the Church in Europe 93
III.
Second Discourse at the Sorbonne 96
Its pregnant thesis of social causation 97
Compared with the thesis of Bossuet 99
And of Montesquieu 100
Analysis of the Second Discourse 102
Characteristic of Turgot's idea of Progress 106
Its limitation 108
Great merit of the Discourse, that it recognises
ordered succession 110
IV.
Turgot appointed Intendant of the Limousin 111
Functions of an Intendant 112
Account of the Limousin 114
Turgot's passion for good government 118
He attempts to deal with the _Taille_ 119
The road _Corvee_ 121
Turgot's endeavours to enlighten opinion 126
Military service 129
" transport 131
The collection of taxes 132
Turgot's private benevolence 133
Introduces the potato 134
Founds an academy 135
Encourages manufacturing industry 136
Enlightened views on Usury 137
Has to deal with a scarcity 138
His plans 139
Instructive facts connected with this famine 142
Turgot's Reflections on the Formation and
Distribution of Wealth 149
V.
Turgot made Controller-General 150
His reforms 151
Their reception 153
His unpopularity 156
Difficulties with the king 157
His dismissal 158
His pursuits in retirement 159
Conclusion 162
TURGOT.
I.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on the 10th of May 1727. He
died in 1781. His life covered rather more than half a century,
extending, if we may put it a little roughly, over the middle fifty
years of the eighteenth century. This middle period marks the exact date
of the decisive and immediate preparation for the Revolution. At its
beginning neither the intellectual nor the social elements of the great
disruption had distinctly appeared, or commenced their fermentation. At
its close their work was completed, and we may count the months thence
until the overthrow of every institution in France. It was between 1727
and 1781 that the true revolution took place. The events from '89 were
only finishing strokes, the final explosion of a fabric under which
every yard had been mined, by the long endeavour for half a century of
an army of destroyers deliberate and involuntary, direct and oblique,
such as the world has never at any other time beheld.
In 1727 Voltaire was returning from his exile in England, to open the
long campaign, of which he was from that time forth to the close of his
days the brilliant and indomitable captain. He died in 1778, bright,
resolute, humane, energetic, to the last. Thus Turgot's life was almost
exactly contemporary with the pregnant era of Voltaire's activity. In
the same spring in which Turgot died, Maurepas too came to his end, and
Necker was dismissed. The last event was the signal at which the floods
of the deluge fairly began to rise, and the revolutionary tide to swell.
It will be observed, moreover, that Turgot was born half a generation
after the first race of the speculative revolutionists. Rousseau,
Diderot, Helvetius, Condillac, D'Alembert, as well as the foreign Hume,
so much the greatest of the whole band of innovators, because
penetrating so much nearer to the depths, all came into the world which
they were to confuse so unspeakably, in the half dozen years between
1711 and 1717. Turgot was of later stock and comes midway between these
fathers of the new church, between Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, and the
generation of its fiery practical apostles, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
Robespierre.[1] The only other illustrious European of this decade was
Adam Smith, who was born in 1723, and between whose labours and some of
the most remarkable of Turgot's there was so much community. We cannot
tell how far the gulf between Turgot and the earlier band was fixed by
the accident that he did not belong to their generation in point of
time. The accident is in itself only worth calling attention to, in
connection with his distance from them in other and more important
points than time.
[Footnote 1: Born in 1743, 1749, and 1759 respectively.]
The years of Turgot exactly bridge the interval between the ministry of
the infamous Dubois and the ministry of the inglorious Calonne; between
the despair and confusion of the close of the regency, and the despair
and confusion of the last ten years of the monarchy. In 1727 we stand on
the threshold of that far-resounding fiery workshop, where a hundred
hands wrought the cunning implements and Cyclopean engines that were to
serve in storming the hated citadels of superstition and injustice. In
1781 we emerge from these subterranean realms into the open air, to find
ourselves surrounded by all the sounds and portents of imminent ruin.
This, then, is the significance of the date of Turgot's birth.
* * * * *
His stock was Norman, and those who amuse themselves by finding a vital
condition of the highest ability in antiquity of blood, may quote the
descent of Turgot in support of their delusion. His biographers speak of
one Togut, a Danish Prince, who walked the earth some thousand years
before the Christian era; and of Saint Turgot in the eleventh century,
the Prior of Durham, biographer of Bede, and first minister of Malcolm
III. of Scotland. We shall do well not to linger in this too dark and
frigid air. Let us pass over Togut and Saint Turgot; and the founder of
a hospital in the thirteenth century; and the great-great-grandfather
who sat as president of the Norman nobles in the States-General of 1614,
and the grandfather who deserted arms for the toga. History is hardly
concerned in this solemn marshalling of shades.
Even with Michel-Etienne, the father of Turgot, we have here no dealing.
Let it suffice to say that he held high municipal office in Paris, and
performed its duties with exceptional honour and spirit, giving
sumptuous fetes, constructing useful public works, and on one occasion
jeoparding his life with a fine intrepidity that did not fail in his
son, in appeasing a bloody struggle between two bodies of Swiss and
French guards. There is in the library of the British Museum a folio of
1740, containing elaborate plates and letterpress, descriptive of the
fetes celebrated by the city of Paris with Michel-Etienne Turgot as its
chief officer, on the occasion of the marriage of Louise-Elizabeth of
France to Don Philip of Spain (August 1739). As one contemplates these
courtly sumptuosities, La Bruyere's famous picture recurs to the mind,
of far other scenes in the same gay land. 'We see certain wild animals,
male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by
the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable
pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on
their feet, they show a human face; in fact they are men.' That these
violent and humiliating contrasts are eternal and inevitable, is the
last word of the dominant philosophy of society; and one of the reasons
why Turgot's life is worth studying, is that he felt in so pre-eminent
a degree the urgency of lightening the destiny of that livid, wild,
hardly articulate, ever-toiling multitude.
The sum of the genealogical page is that Turgot inherited that position
which, falling to worthy souls, is of its nature so invaluable, a family
tradition of exalted courage and generous public spirit. There have been
noble and patriotic men who lacked this inheritance, but we may be sure
that even these would have fought the battle at greater advantage, if a
magnanimous preference for the larger interests had come to them as a
matter of instinctive prejudice, instead of being acquired as a matter
of reason. The question of titular aristocracy is not touched by this
consideration, for titular aristocracies postpone the larger interests
to the narrow interests of their order. And Turgot's family was only of
the secondary noblesse of the robe.
Turgot was the third son of his father. As the employments which persons
of respectable family could enter were definite and stereotyped, there
was little room for debate as to the calling for which a youth should
prepare himself. Arms, civil administration, and the church, furnished
the only three openings for a gentleman. The effects of this rigorous
adherence to artificial and exclusive rules of caste were manifestly
injurious to society, as such caste rules always are after a society has
passed beyond a certain stage. To identify the interests of the richest
and most powerful class with the interests of the church, of the army,
and of a given system of civil government, was indeed to give to that
class the strongest motives for leaving the existing social order
undisturbed. It unfortunately went too far in this direction, by
fostering the strongest possible motives of hostility to such
modifications in these gigantic departments as changing circumstances
might make needful, in the breasts of the only men who could produce
these modifications without a violent organic revolution. Such a system
left too little course to spontaneity, and its curse is the curse of
French genius. Some of its evil effects were obvious and on the surface.
The man who should have been a soldier found himself saying mass and
hearing confessions. Vauvenargues, who was born for diplomacy or
literature, passed the flower of his days in the organised dreariness of
garrisons and marches. In our own day communities and men who lead them
have still to learn that no waste is so profuse and immeasurable, even
from the material point of view, as that of intellectual energy,
checked, uncultivated, ignored, or left without its opportunity. In
France, until a very short time before the Revolution, we can hardly
point to a single recognised usage which did not augment this waste. The
eldest son usually preserved the rank and status of the family, whether
civil or military. Turgot's eldest brother was to devote himself to
civil administration, the next to be a soldier, and Turgot himself to be
an ecclesiastic.
The second of the brothers, who began by following arms, had as little
taste for them as the future minister had for the church. It is rather
remarkable that he seems to have had the same passion for
administration, and he persuaded the government after the loss of Canada
that Guiana, to be called Equinoctial France, would if well governed
become some sort of equivalent for the northern possession. He was made
Governor-general, but he had forgotten to take the climate into account,
and the scheme came to an abortive end, involving him in a mass of
confused quarrels which lasted some years. He had a marked love for
botany, agriculture, and the like; was one of the founders of the
Society of Agriculture in 1760; and was the author of various pieces on
points of natural history.[2]
[Footnote 2: Among others, of a little volume still to be met with in
libraries, _Sur la maniere de preparer les diverses curiosites
d'histoire naturelle_ (1758).]
Turgot went as a boarder first to the college of Louis-le-Grand, then to
that of Plessis; thence to the seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he took
the degree of bachelor in theology; and from Saint Sulpice to the
Sorbonne. His childhood and youth, like that of other men who have
afterwards won love and admiration, have their stories. The affection of
one biographer records how the pocket-money with which the young Turgot
was furnished, used always instantly to disappear, no one knew how nor
on what. It was discovered that he gave it to poor schoolfellows to
enable them to buy books. Condorcet justly remarks on this trait, that
'goodness and even generosity are not rare sentiments in childhood; but
for these sentiments to be guided by such wisdom, this really seems the
presage of an extraordinary man, all whose sentiments should be virtues,
because they would always be controlled by reason.'[3] It is at any rate
certain that the union of profound benevolence with judgment, which this
story prefigures, was the supreme distinction of Turgot's character. It
is less pleasant to learn that Turgot throughout his childhood was
always repulsed by his mother, who deemed him sullen, because he failed
to make his bow with good grace, and was shy and taciturn. He fled from
her visitors, and would hide himself behind sofa or screen; until
dragged forth for social inspection.[4] This is only worth recording,
because the same external awkwardness and lack of grace remained with
Turgot to the end, and had something to do with the unpopularity that
caused his fall. Perhaps he was thinking of his own childhood, when he
wrote that fathers are often indifferent, or incessantly occupied with
the details of business, and that he had seen the very parents who
taught their children that there is nothing so noble as to make people
happy, yet repulse the same children when urging some one's claim to
charity or favour, and intimidate their young sensibility, instead of
encouraging and training it.[5]
[Footnote 3: _Vie de Turgot_, p. 8 (ed. 1847).]
[Footnote 4: _Memoires de Morellet_, i. 12 (ed. 1822).]
[Footnote 5: Lettre a Madame de Graffigny. _OEuv._ ii. 793.]
Morellet, one of the best known of the little group of friends and
brother students at the Sorbonne, has recorded other authentic traits.
Turgot, he says, united the simplicity of a child to a peculiar dignity
that forced the respect of his comrades. His modesty and reserve were
those of a girl, and those equivocal references in which the
undisciplined animalism of youth often has a stealthy satisfaction,
always called the blood to his cheeks and covered him with
embarrassment. For all that, his spirit was full of a frank gaiety, and
he would indulge in long bursts of laughter at a pleasantry or frolic
that struck him. We may be glad to know this, because without express
testimony to the contrary, there would have been some reason for
suspecting that Turgot was defective in that most wholesome and human
quality of a capacity for laughter.
The sensitive purity which Morellet notices, not without slight lifting
of the eyebrow, remained with Turgot throughout his life. This was the
more remarkable from the prevailing laxity of opinion upon this
particular subject, perhaps the worst blemish upon the feeling and
intelligence of the revolutionary schools. For it was not merely
libertines, like Marmontel, making a plea for their own dissoluteness,
who habitually spoke of these things with inconsiderate levity. Grave
men of blameless life, like Condorcet, deliberately argued in favour of
leaving a loose rein to the mutual inclinations of men and women, and
laughed at the time 'wasted in quenching the darts of the flesh.'[6] It
is true that at D'Holbach's house, the headquarters of the dogmatic
atheism in which the irreligious reaction culminated, this was the only
theme on which freedom of speech was sometimes curtailed. But the fact
that such a restriction should have been noticed, suggests that it was
exceptional.[7] One good effect followed, let us admit. The virtuousness
of continence was not treated as a superstition by those who vindicated
it as Turgot did, but discussed like any other virtue; and was defended
not as an intuition of faith, but as a reasoned conclusion of the
judgment. It was permitted to occupy no solitary and mysterious throne,
apart and away from other conditions and parts of human excellence and
social wellbeing. There is intrinsically no harm in any virtue being
accepted in the firm shape of a simple prejudice. On the contrary, there
is a multitude of practical advantages in such a consolidated and
spontaneously working order. But in considering conduct and character,
and forming an opinion upon infractions of a virtue, we cannot be just
unless we have analysed its conditions, and this is what the eighteenth
century did defectively with regard to that particular virtue which so
often usurps the name of all of the virtues together. In this respect
Turgot's original purity of character withdrew him from the error of the
time.
[Footnote 6: Letter to Turgot, _OEuv. de Condorcet_, i. 228. See also
vi. 264, and 523-526.]
[Footnote 7: Morellet, i. 133.]
With the moral quality that we have seen, Morellet adds that for the
intellectual side Turgot as a boy had a prodigious memory. He could
retain as many as a hundred and eighty lines of verse, after hearing
them twice, or sometimes even once. He knew by heart most of Voltaire's
fugitive pieces, and long passages in his poems and tragedies. His
predominant characteristics are described as penetration, and that other
valuable faculty to which penetration is an indispensable adjunct, but
which it by no means invariably implies--a spirit of broad and
systematic co-ordination. The unusual precocity of his intelligence was
perhaps imperfectly appreciated by his fellow-students, it led him so
far beyond any point within their sight. It has been justly said of him
that he passed at once from infancy to manhood, and was in the rank of
sages before he had shaken off the dust of the playground. He was of the
type of those who strangle serpents while yet in the cradle. We know the
temperament which from the earliest hour consumes with eager desire for
knowledge, and energises spontaneously with unceasing and joyful
activity in that bright and pure morning of intellectual curiosity,
which neither the dull tumultuous needs of life nor the mists of
spiritual misgiving have yet come up to make dim. Of this temperament
was Turgot in a superlative degree, and its fire never abated in him
from college days, down to the last hours while he lay racked with
irremediable anguish.
To a certain extent this was the glorious mark of all the best minds of
the epoch; from Voltaire downwards, they were inflamed by an
inextinguishable and universal curiosity. Voltaire hardly left a single
corner of the field entirely unexplored in science, poetry, history,
philosophy. Rousseau wrote a comic opera and was an ardent botanist.
Diderot wrote, and wrote well and intelligently, _de omni scibili_, and
was the author alike of the Letters on the Blind and Jacques le
Fataliste. No era was ever so little the era of the specialist.
* * * * *
The society of the Sorbonne corresponded exactly to a college at one of
our universities, and will be distinguished by the careful reader from
the faculty of theology in the university, which was usually, but not
always, composed of _docteurs de Sorbonne_. It consisted of a large
number of learned men in the position of fellows, and a smaller number
of younger students, who lived together just as undergraduates do, in
separate apartments, but with common hall, library, and garden. One of
Turgot's masters, Sigorgne, was the first to teach in the university the
Newtonian principles of astronomy, instead of the Cartesian hypothesis
of vortices. As is well known, Cartesianism had for various reasons
taken a far deeper root in France than it ever did here, and held its
place a good generation after Newtonian ideas were accepted and taught
at Oxford and Cambridge.[8] Voltaire's translation of the _Principia_,
which he was prevented by the Cartesian chancellor, D'Aguesseau, from
publishing until 1738, overthrew the reigning system, and gave a strong
impulse to scientific inquiry.
[Footnote 8: Whewell's _Hist. Induct. Sciences_, ii. 147-159.]
Turgot mastered the new doctrine with avidity. In the acute letter of
criticism which, while still at the Sorbonne, he addressed to Buffon, he
pointedly urged it as the first objection to that writer's theory of the
formation and movements of the planets, that any attempt at fundamental
explanations of this kind was a departure from 'the simplicity and safe
reserve of the philosophy of Newton.'[9] He only, however, made a
certain advance in mathematics. He appears to have had no peculiar or
natural aptitude for this study; though he is said to have constantly
blamed himself for not having gone more deeply into it. It is hardly to
be denied that mathematical genius and philosophic genius do not always
go together. The precision, definiteness, and accurate limitations of
the method of the one, are usually unfriendly to the brooding,
tentative, uncircumscribed meditation which is the productive humour in
the other. Turgot was essentially of the philosophising temper. Though
the activity of his intelligence was incessant, his manner of work was
the reverse of quick. 'When he applied to work,' says Morellet, 'when it
was a question of writing or doing, he was slow and loitering. Slow,
because he insisted on finishing all he did perfectly, according to his
own conception of perfection, which was most difficult of attainment,
even down to the minutest detail; and because he would not receive
assistance, being never contented with what he had not done himself. He
also loitered a great deal, losing time in arranging his desk and
cutting his pens, not that he was not thinking profoundly through all
this trifling; but mere thinking did not advance his work.'[10] We may
admit, perhaps, that the work was all the better for the thinking that
preceded it, and that the time which Turgot seemed to waste in cutting
his pens and setting his table in order was more fruitfully spent than
the busiest hours of most men.
[Footnote 9: _OEuv. de Turgot_, ii. 783. (Edition of Messrs. Eugene
Daire and H. Dussard, published in the _Collection des Principaux
Economistes_, published by Guillaumin, 1844.)]
[Footnote 10: _Memoires_, i. 16.]
We know the books which Turgot and his friends devoured with ardour.
Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Buffon, relieved Clarke, Leibnitz, Spinosa,
Cudworth; and constant discussions among themselves both cleared up and
enlarged what they read.[11] One of the disputants, certainly not the
least amiable, has painted his own part in these discussions: 'I was
violent in discussion,' says the good Morellet, as he was pleasantly
called, 'but without my antagonist being able to reproach me with a
single insult; and sometimes I used to spit blood, after a debate in
which I had not allowed a single personality to escape me.'[12]
[Footnote 11: _Ib._ i. 20.]
[Footnote 12: _Ib._ i. 19.]
Another member of the circle was Lomenie de Brienne, who, in long years
after, was chief minister of France for a narrow space through the
momentous winter of 1787 and the spring of the next year, filling the
gap between Calonne and Necker in a desperate and fatal manner.
Lomenie's ambition dated from his youth; and it was always personal and
mean. While Turgot, his friend, was earnestly meditating on the
destinies of the race and the conditions of their development, Lomenie
was dreaming only of the restoration of his ancestral chateau of
Brienne. Though quite without means, he planned this in his visions on a
scale of extreme costliness and magnificence. The dreams fell true.
Money came to the family, and the chateau was built exactly as he had
projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was
splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion,
astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading
you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in
all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the
Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be
Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that
'an Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God.' He became an
immense favourite with Marie Antoinette and the court, was made Minister
'like Richelieu and Mazarin,' and after having postured and played
tricks in face of the bursting deluge, and given the government the
final impulse into the abyss of bankruptcy, was dismissed with the rich
archbishopric of Sens and a cardinal's hat for himself, and good
sinecures for his kinsfolk. His last official act was to send for the
20,000 livres for his month's salary, not fully due. His brother, the
Count of Brienne, remained in office as Minister of War. He was a person
of no talent, his friends allowed, but 'assisted by a good chief clerk,
he would have made a good minister; he meant well.' This was hardly a
sufficient reason for letting him take 100,000 francs out of an
impoverished treasury for the furniture of his residence. The hour,
however, was just striking, and the knife was sharpened.
[Footnote 13: Morellet's _Memoires_, i. 17-21; 262-270; and ii. 15.]
[Footnote 14: Marmontel's _Memoires_, bk. xiii.; Morellet, however, with
persevering friendliness, denies the truth of Marmontel's picture (ii.
465).]
All his paltry honour and glory Lomenie de Brienne enjoyed for a season,
until the Jacobins laid violent hands upon him. He poisoned himself in
his own palace, just as a worse thing was about to befall him. Alas,
poetic justice is the exception in history, and only once in many
generations does the drama of the state criminal rise to an artistic
fifth act. This was in 1794. In 1750 a farewell dinner had been given in
the rooms of the Abbe de Brienne at the Sorbonne, and the friends made
an appointment for a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne in
the year 1800.[15] The year came, but no Lomenie, nor Turgot, and the
Sorbonne itself had vanished.
[Footnote 15: Morellet, i. 21.]
When the time arrived for his final acceptance of an ecclesiastical
destination, Turgot felt that honourable repugnance, which might have
been anticipated alike from his morality and his intelligence, to enter
into an engagement which would irrevocably bind him for the rest of his
life, either always to hold exactly the same opinions, or else to
continue to preach them publicly after he had ceased to hold them
privately. No certainty of worldly comfort and advantage could in his
eyes counterbalance the possible danger and shame of a position, which
might place him between the two alternatives of stifling his
intelligence and outraging his conscience--the one by blind,
unscrutinising, and immovable acceptance of all the dogmas and
sentiments of the Church; the other by the inculcation as truths of what
he believed to be false, and the proscription as falsehoods of what he
believed to be true. The horror and disgrace of such a situation were
too striking for one who used his mind and acted on principle, to run
any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver
like Lomenie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet,
might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and
eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be
only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the
adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of
common hearsay and current usage, without deliberate personal reflection
and inquiry.
At the close of his course at the Sorbonne, he wrote a letter to his
father giving the reasons for this resolution to abandon all idea of an
ecclesiastical career and the advancement which it offered him, and
seeking his consent for the change from Church to law. His father
approved of the resolution, and gave the required consent. As Turgot had
studied law as well as theology, no time was lost, and he formally
entered the profession of the law as Deputy-Counsellor of the
Procureur-General at the beginning of 1752.
His college friends had remonstrated warmly at this surrender of a
brilliant prospect. A little deputation of young abbes, fresh from their
vows, waited on him at his rooms; in that humour of blithe and sagacious
good-will which comes so naturally to men who believe they have just
found out Fortune's trick and yoked her fast for ever to the car, they
declared that he was about to do something opposed to his own interest
and inconsistent with his usual good sense. He was a younger son of a
Norman house, and therefore poor; the law without a competency involved
no consideration, and he could hope for no advancement in it: whereas in
the Church his family, being possessed of influence and credit, would
have no difficulty in procuring for him excellent abbeys and in good
time a rich bishopric; here he could realise all his fine dreams of
administration, and without ceasing to be a churchman could play the
statesman to his heart's content. In one profession he would waste his
genius in arguing trifling private affairs, while in the other he would
be of the highest usefulness to his country, and would acquire the
greatest reputation. Turgot, however, insisted on placing genius and
reputation below the necessity of being honest. The object of an oath
might be of the least important kind, but he could neither allow himself
to play with it, nor believe that a man could abase his profession in
public opinion, without at the same time abasing himself. '_You shall do
as you will_,' he said; '_for my own part, it is impossible for me to
wear a mask all my life_.'[16]
[Footnote 16: Dupont de Nemours. Condorcet's _Vie de Turgot_, pp. 8-10.]
His clear intelligence revolted from the dominant sophisms of that time,
by which philosophers as well as ecclesiastics brought falsehood and
hypocrisy within the four corners of a decent doctrine of truth and
morality. The churchman manfully argued that he could be most useful to
the world if he were well off and highly placed. The philosopher
contended that as the world would punish him if he avowed what he had
written or what he believed, he was fully warranted in lying to the
world as to his writing and belief; for is not the right to have the
truth told to you, a thing forfeitable by tyranny and oppression?[17]
Truth is not mocked, and these sophisms bore their fruit in due season.
Perhaps if there had been found on either side in France a hundred
righteous men like Turgot, who would not fight in masks, the end might
have been other than it was. The lesson remains for those who dream that
by reducing pretence to a nicely graduated system, and by leaving an
exactly measured margin between what they really believe and what they
feign to believe, they are serving the great cause of order. French
history informs us what becomes of social order so served. After all, no
man can be sure that it is required of him to save society; every man
can be sure that he is called upon to keep himself clean from mendacity
and equivoke. Such was Turgot's view.
[Footnote 17: 'La necessite de mentir pour desavouer un ouvrage est une
extremite qui repugne egalement a la conscience et a la noblesse du
caractere; mais le crime est pour les hommes injustes qui rendent ce
desaveu necessaire a la surete de celui qu'ils y forcent. Si vous avez
erige en crime ce qui n'en est pas un, si vous avez porte atteinte, par
des lois absurdes ou par des lois arbitraires, au droit naturel qu'ont
tous les hommes, non seulement d'avoir une opinion, mais de la rendre
publique, alors vous meritez de perdre celui qu'a chaque homme
d'entendre la verite de la bouche d'un autre, droit qui fonde seule
l'obligation rigoureuse de ne pas mentir.'--Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire_
(_OEuv._ iv. 33, 34).]
We have said that Turgot disdained to fight under a mask. There was one
exception, and only one. In 1754 there appeared two letters, nominally
from an ecclesiastic to a magistrate, and entitled _Le Conciliateur_.
Here it is enough to say that they were intended to enforce the
propriety and duty of religious toleration. In a letter to a friend we
find Turgot saying, 'Although the _Conciliator_ is of my principles, and
those of our friend, I am astonished at your conjectures; _it is neither
his style nor mine_.'[18] Yet Turgot had written it. This is his one
public literary equivocation. Let us, at all events, allow that it was
resorted to, not to break the law with safety, nor to cloak a malicious
attack on a person, but to give additional weight by means of a harmless
prosopopoeia, to an argument for the noblest of principles.[19]
[Footnote 18: _OEuv._ ii. 685. Morellet says that it was written by
Lomenie de Brienne, 19.]
[Footnote 19: See the note of Dupont de Nemours, _ad loc._]
* * * * *
Before Turgot entered the great world, he had already achieved an amount
of success in philosophic speculation, which placed him in the front
rank of social thinkers. To that passion for study and the acquisition
of knowledge which is not uncommon in youth, as it is one of the most
attractive of youth's qualities, there was added in him what is
unhappily not common in men and women of any age--an active impulse to
use his own intelligence upon the information which he gained from books
and professors. He was no conceited or froward caviller at authority,
nor born rebel against established teachers and governors. His
understanding seriously craved a full and independent satisfaction, and
could draw this only from laborious meditation, which should either
disclose the inadequacy of the grounds for an opinion, or else establish
it, with what would be to him a new and higher because an independently
acquired, conclusiveness.
His letter to Buffon, to which we have already referred, is an
illustration of this wise, and never captious nor ungracious, caution in
receiving ideas. Neither Buffon's reputation, nor the glow of his style,
nor the dazzling ingenuity and grandeur of his conceptions--all of them
so well calculated, at one-and-twenty, to throw even a vigilant
intelligence off its guard--could divert Turgot from the prime
scientific duty of confronting a theory with facts. Buffon was for
explaining the formation of the earth and the other planets, and their
lateral movement, by the hypothesis that a comet had fallen obliquely on
to the sun, driven off certain portions of its constituent matter in a
state of fusion, and that these masses, made spherical by the mutual
attraction of their parts, were carried to different distances in
proportion to their mass and the force originally impressed on them.
Buffon may have been actuated, both here and in his other famous
hypothesis of reproduction, by a desire, less to propound a true and
durable explanation, than to arrest by a bold and comprehensive
generalisation that attention, which is only imperfectly touched by mere
collections of particular facts. The enormous impulse which even the
most unscientific of the speculations of Descartes had given to European
thought, was a standing temptation to philosophers, not to discard nor
relax patient observation, but to bind together the results which they
arrived at by this process, by means of some hardy hypothesis. It might
be true or not, but it was at any rate sure to strike the imagination,
which ever craves wholes; and to stimulate discussion and further
discovery, by sending assailants and defenders alike in search of new
facts, to confirm or overthrow the position.[20]
[Footnote 20: See Condorcet's eloge on Buffon (_OEuv._ iii. 335); and
a passage from Bourdon, quoted in Whewell's _Hist. Induct. Sci._ iii.
348.]
Turgot was less sensible of these possible advantages, than he was alive
to the certain dangers of such a method. He perceived that to hold a
theory otherwise than as an inference from facts, is to have a strong
motive for looking at the facts in a predetermined light, or for
ignoring them; an involuntary predisposition most fatal to the discovery
of truth, which is nothing more than the conformity of our conception of
facts to their adequately observed order. Why, he asks, do you replunge
us into the night of hypotheses, justifying the Cartesians and their
three elements and their vortices? And whence comes your comet? Was it
within the sphere of the sun's attraction? If not, how could it fall
from the sphere of the other bodies, and fall on the sun, which was not
acting on it? If it was, it must have fallen perpendicularly, not
obliquely; and, therefore, if it imparted a lateral movement, this
direction must have been impressed on it. And, if so, why should not God
have impressed this movement upon the planets directly, as easily as
upon the comet to communicate it to them? Finally, how could the planets
have left the body of the sun without falling back into it again? What
curve did they describe in leaving it, so as never to return? Can you
suppose that gravitation could cause the same body to describe a spiral
and an ellipse? In the same exact spirit, Turgot brings known facts to
bear on Buffon's theory of the arrangement of the terrestrial and marine
divisions of the earth's surface. The whole criticism he sent to Buffon
anonymously, to assure him that the writer had no other motive than the
interest he took in the discovery of truth and the perfection of a great
work.[21]
[Footnote 21: October, 1748. _OEuv._ ii. 782-784.]
Turgot's is probably the only case where the biographer has, in emerging
from the days of school and college, at once to proceed to expound and
criticise the intellectual productions of his hero, and straightway to
present fruit and flower of a time that usually does no more than
prepare the unseen roots. There is, perhaps, a wider and more
stimulating attraction of a dramatic kind in the study of characters
which present a history of active and continuous growth; which, while
absolutely free from flimsy caprice and disordered eccentricity, are
ever surprising our attention by an unsuspected word of calm judgment or
fertile energy, a fresh interest or an added sympathy, by the
disappearance of some crudity or the assimilation of some new and richer
quality. Of such gradual rise into full maturity we have here nothing to
record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of
works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic
romances, vast treatises on physics, history, geography, politics,
morals, metaphysics, and language.[22] Of some he had drawn out the
plan, and even these plans and fragments possess a novelty and depth of
view that belong even to the integrity of few works.
[Footnote 22: Condorcet's _Vie de Turgot_, 14.]
Before passing on to the more scientific speculations of this remarkable
intelligence, it is worth while to notice his letter to Madame de
Graffigny, both for the intrinsic merit and scope of the ideas it
contains and for the proof it furnishes of the interest, at once early
and profound, which he took in moral questions lying at the very bottom,
as well of sound character, as of a healthy society. Turgot's early
passion for literature had made him seize an occasion of being
introduced to even so moderately renowned a professor of it as Madame de
Graffigny. He happened to be intimate with her niece, who afterwards
became the lively and witty wife of Helvetius, somewhat to the surprise
of Turgot's friends. For although he persuaded Mademoiselle de
Ligniville to present him to her aunt, and though he assiduously
attended Madame de Graffigny's literary gatherings, Turgot would
constantly quit the circle of men of letters for the sake of a game of
battledore with the comely and attractive niece. Hence the astonishment
of men that from such familiarity there grew no stronger passion, and
that whatever the causes of such reserve, the only issue was a tender
and lasting friendship.[23]
[Footnote 23: Morellet, i. 140.]
Madame de Graffigny had begged Turgot's opinion upon the manuscript of a
work composed, as so many others were, after the pattern of
Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_,--now nearly thirty years old,--and
bearing the accurately imitative title of _Lettres Peruviennes_. A
Peruvian comes to Europe, and sends to a friend or mistress in Peru a
series of remarks on civilisation. Goldsmith's delightful _Citizen of
the World_ is the best known type in our own literature of this
primitive form of social criticism. The effect upon common opinion of
criticism cast in such a mould, presenting familiar habits,
institutions, and observances, in a striking and unusual light, was to
give a kind of Socratic stimulus to people's ideas about education,
civilisation, conduct, and the other topics springing from a comparison
between the manners of one community and another. That one of the two,
whether Peru, or China, or Persia, was a community drawn mainly from the
imagination, did not render the contrast any the less effective in
stirring men's minds.
By the middle of the century the air was full of ideas upon these social
subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of
squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative
disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple
circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and
unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and
found. It was the beginning of the subversive process, for it taught men
to look away from ideas of practical amelioration. The genius of
Rousseau gave these dreams the shape which, in many respects, so
unfortunately for France, finally attracted the bulk of the national
sentiment and sympathy. But the vivid, humane, and inspiring pages of
_Emile_ were not published until ten years after Turgot's letter to
Madame de Graffigny:[24] a circumstance which may teach us that in moral
as in physical discoveries, though one man may take the final step and
reap the fame, the conditions have been prepared beforehand. It is
almost discouraging to think that we may reproduce such passages as the
following, without being open to the charge of slaying the slain, though
one hundred and twenty years have elapsed since it was written.
[Footnote 24: Written in 1751. _OEuv._ ii. 785-794.]
'Let Zilia show that our too arbitrary institutions have too often made
us forget nature; that we have been the dupes of our own handiwork, and
that the savage who does not know how to consult nature knows how to
follow her. Let her criticise our pedantry, for it is this that
constitutes our education of the present day. Look at the Rudiments;
they begin by insisting on stuffing into the heads of children a crowd
of the most abstract ideas. Those whom nature in her variety summons to
her by all her objects, we fasten up in a single spot, we occupy them on
words which cannot convey any sense to them, because the sense of words
can only come with ideas, and ideas only come by degrees, starting from
sensible objects.[25] But, besides, we insist on their acquiring them
without the help that we have had, we whom age and experience have
formed. We keep their imagination prisoner, we deprive them of the
sight of objects by which nature gives to the savage his first notions
of all things, of all the sciences even. We have not the coup-d'oeil
of nature.
[Footnote 25: 'On sera surpris que je compte l'etude des langues au
nombre des inutilites de l'education,' etc.--_Emile_, bk. ii.]
'It is the same with morality; general ideas again spoil all. People
take great trouble to tell a child that he must be just, temperate, and
virtuous; and has it the least idea of virtue? Do not say to your son,
_Be virtuous_, but make him find pleasure in being so; develop within
his heart the germ of sentiments that nature has placed there.[26] There
is often much more need for bulwarks against education, than against
nature. Give him opportunities of being truthful, liberal,
compassionate; rely on the human heart; leave these precious seeds to
bloom in the air which surrounds them; do not stifle them under a
quantity of frames and network. I am not one of those who want to reject
general and abstract ideas; they are necessary; but I by no means think
them in their place in our method of instruction. I would have them come
to children as they come to men, by degrees.
[Footnote 26: See Locke, _Of Education_, Sec.Sec. 81, 184, etc.]
'Another article of our education, which strikes me as bad and
ridiculous, is our severity towards these poor children. They do
something silly; we take them up as if it were extremely important.
There is a multitude of these follies, of which they will cure
themselves by age alone. But people do not count on that; they insist
that the son should be well bred, and they overwhelm him with little
rules of civility, often frivolous, which can only harass him, as he
does not know the reason for them. I think it would be enough to hinder
him from being troublesome to the persons that he sees.[27] The rest
will come, little by little. Inspire him with the desire of pleasing; he
will soon know more of the art than all the masters could teach him.
People wish again that a child should be grave; they think it wise for
it not to run, and fear every moment that it will fall. What happens?
You weary and enfeeble it. We have especially forgotten that it is a
part of education to form the body.'[28]
[Footnote 27: 'La seule lecon de morale qui convienne a l'enfance, et la
plus importante a tout age, est de ne jamais faire de mal a personne,'
etc. _Emile_, bk. ii. 'Never trouble yourself about these faults in
them, which you know age will cure. And therefore want of well-fashioned
civility in the carriage ... should be the parents' least care while
they are young. If his tender mind be filled with a veneration for his
parents and teachers, which consists in love and esteem and a fear to
offend them; and with respect and good-will to all people; that respect
will of itself teach these ways of expressing it, which he observes most
acceptable,' etc.--Locke, _Of Education_, Sec.Sec. 63, 67, etc.]
[Footnote 28: 'Vous donnez la science, a la bonne heure; moi je m'occupe
de l'instrument propre a l'acquerir,' etc.--_Emile._]
The reader who remembers Locke's Thoughts concerning Education
(published in 1690), and the particularly homely prescriptions upon the
subjects of the infant body with which that treatise opens, will
recognise the source of Turgot's inspiration. The same may be said of
the other wise passages in this letter, upon the right attitude of a
father towards his child. It was not merely the metaphysics of the sage
and positive Locke which laid the revolutionary train in France. This
influence extended over the whole field, and even Rousseau confesses the
obligations of the imaginary governor of Emile to the real Locke.
We are again plainly in the Lockian atmosphere, when Turgot speaks of
men being the dupes of 'general ideas, which are true because drawn from
nature, but which people embrace with a narrow stiffness that makes them
false, because they no longer combine them with circumstances, taking
for absolute what is only the expression of a relation.' The merit of
this and the other educational parts of the piece, is not their
originality, but that kind of complete and finished assimilation which
is all but tantamount to independent thought, and which in certain
conditions may be much more practically useful.